Mounties and politicians

David Levy

Calgary, Alberta

What a rotten shame, losing all those affable Russians from Ottawa, and one from lvjontreal (the ICAO man, who was particularly affable and well ensconced in that °rganisation's secretariat) just to polish off a few of the Liberal Government's political Problems and to polish up the tarnished

nage of the Royal Canadian Mounted rolice. This is the force which for months as suffered a drum-fire of condemnation

`rent the Opposition in the Ottawa House ° f Commons and in the public media for the Illegalities and improprieties of its security section's operations. It is still the object of two judicial inquiries and it appears about I° get the legal right to open first class mail after opening it illegally for forty years. How much nicer it would have been all around if Pierre Trudeau's Liberal government, which almost certainly is going to have to call an election this year, had sponsored a national revival of Rose Marie, with genuine Canadian stand-ins for Nelson Eddy and Jeanette Macdonald, to restore the Mounties to respectability instead of the Present unseemly mess. After excessive Pusillanimousness in asking the Russians to Pay for the enormously expensive clean-up of the Cosmos pieces in the Northland, sudd,enlY we have this gratuitous pillorying of thirteen Soviet representatives, each one named in stentorian tones by the External Affairs Minister, Donald Jamieson. Some Illissians have already left, while others are packing their bags for a February 23 deadline, driven away by the rules of an interinational game in which the losers are the uad guys and winner takes all. The justice meted out has been of a distinctly drumhead variety, which of course Russians traditionally understand fq a nor,in, al fact of life. And the furore has delivered thecoup de grace to the Ottawa Russians, already writhing with embarrassment over the crash of Cosmos 954 in the North West Territories.

The mortified silence reigning at the Soviet Embassy is therefore understandable. It is a silence broken only by the Press attache, Viktor Mikheyev's occasional pained cries of 'foul', more in studied ,serrow than in anger, to radio and TV. 'We loye very much Canada'. said Mikheyev, 'Is nice country. We love very much Canadians. All Canadians are jolly good fellows.'

A Calgary Herald cartoon linked the two disasters by depicting a line of thuggish Russian stereotypes clumping out to board kGB Airline's Flight 007, with one saying to the fellow behind him: 'I knew damn well We should have paid for that gatellite search business'.

The expelled Russians will, of course, be replaced by others in due course and so an element of fatuity has already made itself felt; even though no one denies that spying cannot be allowed to pass without penalty, if only to keep it within bounds.

But why the huge fuss? Why not inform the key Soviet operatives that the game was up, ignore their menials who made up the bulk of the thirteen expelled diplomats and who had no option (except defection) to do anything other than go along with the bosses' conspiracy? (I confess that my heart bleeds for all of them, denied as they now are of the chance to serve again in any Western country, which is a prize goal of all Soviet citizens who can even dream of such assignments in the first place. They receive much of their pay in hard currency, and are able for instance to buy even Soviet export model cars at low Western prices, taking delivery back home, then selling them for sufficient roubles to retire on.) This question has been openly bothering some of Ottawa's grandest journalists, men well versed in the ways of the Liberal government, notably the acerbic Charles Lynch of the Southam News Service.

At Question Time during Prime Minister Trudeau's regular press conference, the morning after Mr Jamieson's hammy denunciation of the Soviets in the House, Lynch did not mince words: 'You may find it amusing, Mr Prime Minister,' he began, tut this has been a pretty opportune time for the RCMP (the Mounties) to pull off a nice spy coup like this one, and I would ask whether you are totally satisfied that the motivation behind this is just good police work, that it was in every respect a perfectly normal operation, that there was no element of inducement or entrapment involved, and that the RCMP did not in fact invite this whole operation by approaching the Soviet Embassy.'

Instead of challenging Lynch's assump tion that inducement, entrapment and invitation are necessarily inimical to good police work, Trudeau hesitated for a full twenty seconds before replying with a most uncharacteristic claim to naivete. 'Quite frankly,' he said, 'I am not cynical. I really can't be other than amused by this type of cynical speculation.'

Cynical speculation or not, it was this exchange that obviously gave the press attaché, Mikheyev the cue to tell reporters that he had been approached several times by the RCMP trying to trap him into espionage and that this was used to implicate the now expelled Soviet officials. It also probably accounted for the whirlwind speed, by Soviet press standards, with which Moscow Radio and TASS reacted to the fuss in Canada. The full truth about who approached whom in the first place is virtually uncheckable. The RCMP is brazening out all pressure to reveal who their double agent is and has promised to keep his identity secret for ever.

What one believes amongst all this is ultimately a personal matter. But is it so impossible to accept that the KGB might once have had a man inside the RCMP, might have lost that man, and that the KGB reckoned it was ripe last April to take the bait of another Philby, and along with the bait the risk of being fooled? 2n the circles one is here considering, this all seems legitimate enough. What is not so legitimate is the Liberal Party, as an electioneering ploy, making mugs out of the Canadian public with all this feigning of injured innocence in a game that all sides play, with varying degrees of success.

The inimitable Charles Lynch last Sunday on national radio made no bones about accusing the government of deliberately raising the bogey of the 'red menace' and the Iron Curtain, of reviving the cold war and so on, as a way of smoothing the path for what he termed the billions and billions of dollars for military ships and planes that the Canadian public is going to be asked to spend. 'If you can do that,' he added, 'and get rid of the red Trudeau image, the image of Trudeau the Commie-lover, with an election coming up, and also help to pass the bill to let the RCMP open the mail and let the force look good at the same time, you can knock down lots of birds with this stone.'

This is of course absolute music to the Kremlin. But even Trudeau himself* added his happy refrain for the Soviet propaganda orchestra to play when, in insisting that he did not intend to let this spy affair impede development of further good relations with the Soviet Union, he referred to the benefit that Canada derived from those relations.

It is doubted here that the Russians intend taking any action against Canada over this latest spy scandal. Not with Soviet Foreign Trade Minister Nikolai Patolichev himself due here this week, in advance of a Soviet trade mission. At the time of writing, Patolichev is expected to show up, even though the Canadian External Affairs Minister, Donald Jamieson, has cancelled a planned trip to the Soviet Union. To the Russians this has all really been just a nasty pothole on the smooth road of détente, and anyone who has travelled by car in Russia will know that potholes are taken for granted. The horrendous banging inside the car goes quite unnoticed.